1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle surrounding monitoring system that accurately extracts an obstacle from solid objects in front of the vehicle and provides the driver with information about a steering direction.
Recently vehicles have been developed and put into practical use in which a travel environment in front of a vehicle is detected by an in-vehicle mounted camera or the like, and various control operations such as a follow-up travel control operation of following up a preceding vehicle, a travel control operation of keeping the inter-vehicle distance to the preceding vehicle to a fixed value or more, and an alarm control operation for obstacles existing in front of the vehicle are carried out on the basis of the travel environment data.
2. Description of Related Art
For example, JP-A-2004-34917 discloses a vehicle equipped with a preceding vehicle follow-up control system. Specifically, the preceding vehicle follow-up control system controls the vehicle in which the preceding vehicle follow-up control system itself is mounted (hereinafter referred to as “own vehicle”) so that the own vehicle tracks a preceding vehicle traveling in front of the own vehicle. Preceding vehicles which travel in front of the own vehicle are detected, a follow-up preceding vehicle which is being followed up at present as a follow-up control target by the own vehicle is specified, and follow-up candidate vehicles which are vehicles other than the follow-up preceding vehicle as the present control target and also will potentially become follow-up control targets in the future are specified on the basis of a predetermined area set in front of the own vehicle.
The predetermined area for specifying a preceding vehicle in the above publication is set by offsetting a specific width in the lateral direction of the own vehicle on the basis of a yaw rate occurring in the own vehicle. However, with respect to the setting of the predetermined area as described above, the predetermined area is changed after the own vehicle starts to turn. Therefore, when a preceding vehicle is specified or an alarm is given by using this predetermined area, the control timing is delayed and thus the control precision is lowered.